So today I am trying to do something with my uncles opera database, it lived in a couple of compact pro files, turns out nothing can actually assemble compact pro files except compact pro. So thanks to Richard who had an old mac around I managed to get the csv file on to my mac.

Decompressing Compact Pro multi-part archives is HARD!

The most informative error message was from StuffIt Expander 7 (classic MacOS). It indicated that multi-part Compact Pro (.cpt) archives are not supported by Expander. This limitation is absent from the StuffIt website "supported formats" page.

When extracting with Compact Pro (final release, classic MacOS) it indicated that expansion starts with the last part in the set, rather than the first. It seems probable that, like ZIP files, the end of the archive contains the directory.

The Mac has proven useful twice now (in several years), and has been running from the same hard drive during that time. I suppose it's time to clone it to a newer drive -- but it just keeps running!